Supreme Court Confirms Expert Testimony Required to Establish Causation in Legal Mal Cases

v. Papastavros, 323 Conn. 275 (Sept. 27, 2016), the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that expert testimony is required to establish the element of causation in a legal malpractice case. Thus, even where an attorney’s performance was deficient, if the plaintiff cannot present expert testimony that the outcome of her case would have been different but for the attorney’s negligence, the attorney will prevail. Bozelko thus provides an important procedural safeguard for Connecticut attorneys facing legal malpractice claims. As legal malpractice is a type of negligence, a plaintiff must prove the traditional elements of negligence: duty, breach, causation, and damages. The first element is typically straightforward: a lawyer owes a duty to his or her client. The second element—breach of the duty—asks whether the attorney failed to render legal services with the skill and competence of a reasonably prudent lawyer. In other words, the inquiry is whether the lawyer breached the “standard of care” for attorneys. This is often a hotly contested issue, and the Connecticut Supreme Court has previously ruled that, in jury cases, expert testimony is generally required to establish the standard of care against which the jury must evaluate the attorney’s conduct. This requirement ensures that the jury is properly educated and helps to weed out frivolous claims of negligence since the plaintiff must, at a minimum, find an expert willing to testify that the defendant breached the standard of care. There is an exception to this requirement for “gross negligence”—negligence so obvious it would be apparent even to lay jurors. See Grimm v. Fox, 303 Conn. 322, 330 (2012). This narrow “exception to the need for expert testimony is limited to situations in which the defendant attorney essentially has done nothing whatsoever to represent his or her client’s interests... .” Pagan v. Gonzalez, 113 Conn. App. 135, 141 (2009). In such limited circumstances, a plaintiff may go forward with a malpractice claim against a lawyer without a standard of care expert. But even in obvious cases of negligence—such as where a lawyer inadvertently fails to file a case within the limitations Supreme Court Confirms Expert Testimony Required to Establish Causation in Legal Mal Cases December 21, 2016